


After All Is Said and Done

by Likerealpeopledo



Category: The Mindy Project
Genre: Gen, Remixed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-14
Updated: 2015-07-14
Packaged: 2018-04-09 05:55:41
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,153
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4336436
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Likerealpeopledo/pseuds/Likerealpeopledo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It only bothers him when it rains.</p>
            </blockquote>





	After All Is Said and Done

**Author's Note:**

  * For [alittlenutjob](https://archiveofourown.org/users/alittlenutjob/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Her Guy Friday](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1541819) by [nicasio_silang](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nicasio_silang/pseuds/nicasio_silang). 



> This is a remix of the incomparable Gabby_Silang's Her Guy Friday.
> 
> (Wait, come back!)
> 
> Gabby mentioned in her notes that she hadn't used a Beyonce title (when she usually did) for that piece, so the title is tribute to her.
> 
> I've never remixed anything before, so my thought was that her beautiful and snappy dialogue-heavy fic was my version of canon.
> 
> This is the pre-quel.

It only bothers him when it rains.

He’s edgy and terse, his mouth the jagged edge of a razor.  Danny counts, on occasion, the times he clenches his fist, and the times that he only feels his fingers twitching, ready.  One Tuesday in late May, he tallies twenty clenches and seventeen twitches. The world lost some good drywall that day.

But that was one punch. It could have been thirty seven. Look how he’s evolved.

He’s the divorced father of two beautiful, smart, well-adjusted college-aged children, and he only punched one hole as opposed to what could have been hundreds--so _in your face, Creationists_.  Darwin rules, everyone else drools.

In the span of three months, Danny gains and then loses the same twelve pounds, to the ounce. He grows a full beard, the whiskers white and silver and untenably wiry, ten degrees past any acceptable level of well-groomed or age appropriate. He shaves it immediately after his teenaged daughter makes a terrible, tragic face and declares it patchy and unkempt.

Bare, his face is a map of unsaid words and deeply buried feelings.

He wishes he could have kept the beard.

The thick humid air of June in New York fills his lungs with fiberglass and incites rot in his blood. He’ll admit that it’s entirely possible he could be mistaking heartache for sweeping changes in the dew point and barometric pressure. He has always been prone to the dramatic.

He’s spent the summer mostly alone, the first one in nineteen years not whiled away at Little League and soccer games or drama camp productions or in the city at all.

Longing for the salty tang of the shore, he rents a house on the ocean, looking forward to breezes that whip sand around his ankles and a drier heat that adheres his shirt to his back—with real sweat, the kind you earn from good hard manual labor or a long hard fuck.

Not that he’s had one of those recently; he can’t walk through every open door--but he helps Colin build and stain a new deck on his summer home. There’s a deeply satisfying ache in Danny’s muscles each evening and it only takes half the summer to convince him that creating something with your own two hands is equally as satisfying as the act of procreation.

Ben, his first born, visits with his boyfriend, Finn, and Danny makes six different Mark Twain references that no one bothers to acknowledge. They drink bottles of Dr. Dad’s Sick Brew on the patio under an inky cloudless sky even though Ben isn’t yet twenty-one. He’ll admit it now—being a steadfast rule-follower for the first sixty years of his life hasn’t done Danny many favors.

He sees so much of himself in Ben, and in Cleo, and how fiercely he’s always wanted to wrap them in cotton and protect them from becoming—well, himself-- that it sometimes feels like he pushes them further than he intends.

Obviously, his children are allowed to have their own sets of complaints about him but in general, they both seem to find him present, accessible, and mildly grouchy--more endearingly so than irritating. He’s already endured the phase of child-rearing that is constantly slamming doors and stomping feet, grumblings of _I hate you_ or the tried and true _You never/You always_ arguments, and he’s come out the other side relatively unscathed.

Luckily, Danny had enlisted a partner during the cold war of adolescence, another adult with their finger on the button, always prepared for the nuclear winter. She'd stockpiled the rations and his job was to open the hatch. They'd wait it out together. And they had.

As a couple they could always fall back on a steady pattern of Danny’s temper eventually cooling and Mindy’s building to a slow boil, and finding the place that they could meet in the middle. That is, until they’d realized that their opposite responses resulted in a highly combustible steam that evaporated other things along the way.

Things like patience and respect and the desire to end a fight justly seemed to dissolve in the haze until only a sticky film of doubt remained in their places.

Then again, he could always live with a lot of things that other people couldn’t because he knew what it was like to live without them at all.

Since the divorce, he’s spent exactly twenty minutes with Mindy, because it appears physically impossible to separate the woman from her identity as his wife. His sense memory is almost too prolific, the bookshelves of his subconscious packed tightly and overflowing, always. There are still too many ways he’ll find her soaking right back into his cells, dividing and then multiplying—and he’s already started over more than once.

The beach is a place that he can’t be invaded. They’d always talked about buying a house there, a way for the children to have a summer in the 1980s while still living in the twenty-first century. Sprinklers and fireflies and damp towels flying like flags on laundry lines. Things they couldn’t have in the city.

But they never did—not for more than a week at time—and instead they booked expensive international vacations where someone always got the flu, or misplaced their passport, or left their favorite stuffed dinosaur behind in an overpriced hotel. Danny’s grateful for those memories and even more so that he can relive them in a place that never contained any of them.

He replays the last night that he and Mindy sleep together, the night before the divorce is final, on an endless reel.  Mindy drinks a carafe of overly fruited sangria and cannot stop touching him—his hands, his chest, his face—as if she could grasp just the right piece of flesh that might transport them back into happily married.

People in the pub stare at the practically elderly couple— _they could be our parents_ \-- groping each other like horny teenagers in the back booth, her mouth sweet and his tongue searching, and Danny still hears the murmurs echoing, even after he has her hips pinned beneath him in their familiar rhythm. Even after.

He leaves her in the crisp silver sheets of their marriage bed, her shoulders shaking with poorly suppressed sobs, the taste of wine-infused apples and peaches still in his mouth.

He can’t look back.

He lives with ghosts that fog his mirrors and brush against his skin late at night when his brain is too full to sleep. Sometimes they’re benevolent—nightshirts, sleeping caps, long gray beards—and sometimes they propel him straight to the bottle of Macallan that he hides behind his freshly starched shirts.

It’s the civility that kills him; the ways he can’t hate her, because he never could. It’s his inability to cultivate anything other than an impotent rage when it comes to Mindy that eats at him the most.

He vows to re-record the loop of Mindy’s voice that plays over and over in his head as his conscience and replace it with the sound of his children's laughter or really great guitar driven rock music.  It can't always be her.

In the new house, he can’t find the scraps of their failed marriage lurking under his bed like fanged dust bunnies, or stumble across a collection of letters he sent her once in a language he used to understand.

Everything Danny has now is rented. It’s a metaphor for his life, he knows, but.

The house is decorated in sleek lines and European tastes that translate into furniture no one wants to sit on, so he spends his days reading on the beach and waiting for Cleo to send him her daily text from her uncle’s house on Nantucket. _Hi Daddy, the weather is here. Wish you were beautiful._ He knows she doesn’t know it’s a song.

She’s going to Seattle in the fall for school, and he both dreads and gleefully anticipates the date in equal measure. He wishes she’d spend her last summer in New York closer to home, to him. He can still feel her tiny warm hand wrapped around his fingers as they cross a busy street, her unruly hair sprouting from her head in bowed pig-tails, but a vague resentment has been emanating from her seat the dinner table for longer than he’d like to admit.

Mindy says it’s _a girl thing_ and he believes her, but he’s afraid it’s just going to become _a thing thing_ and Cleo will forever be exasperated by his every word and action, eventually denying his existence at all.

Danny frequents some new yuppie bar (yep, everything that’s old is new again—hipsters will re-emerge when Cleo and Ben are old enough to be chagrined by bearded, ski-cap wearers forcing them off the sidewalk on thousand dollar bicycles) that opens within walking distance from his rental. The owner seems interested in his home brews, but with the whole craft beer E. coli scare, he’s dubious that anything will come of it.

Somehow tonight he’s managed to flirt with a girl, a term he uses empirically, because she’s unsteady as a newborn foal in her spiked heels and he glimpses a glittery tattoo of a dolphin on her inner wrist. Mindy had always warned him about aging too well, that he’d attract girls not much older than their own, and be forever torn between wanting to fuck them senseless in a bathroom stall and sending them home to their worried parents.

He's not so drunk that he can't tell the difference, so he slides her phone back to her, his number unentered.  Leaving, he sees her kissing another man under the street lamps; her hair spun gold in the halos of light, and he doesn't envy either of them.

It doesn't last.

But, for the first time in forever, Danny is light-headed and loose-limbed, and as he stumbles home, he pats his pockets for cigarettes he hasn’t smoked in decades.

He’s noticed that he doesn’t seem to break habits like he used to. It’s more that they break him.

Mindy calls to make arrangements for the trip to Washington while his head is still dangling in the toilet; the tiles cool beneath his pre-arthritic knees, his lips half-numb. He isn’t yet prepared to filter his feelings from his words and she hangs up on him, her intonation vinegar. Danny redials the number of a home he’d lived in for twenty years, and now doesn’t even visit.

They manage to do the dance, the one they’ve always done, _boil boil cool cool fester_ , and what was earlier perestroika is now a comfortable, lived-in détente.

Her laughter runs through him cleanly, like the blade of a knife. He almost asks her if she wants to come out, see the new place, maybe go to a terrible new gastropub and make fun of guys wearing full suits in eighty degree weather. Like a date. His stomach interrupts—or maybe intervenes—and he rushes to recite his credit card number for the flight reservation, as if she doesn’t already have it memorized.

Cleo calls him a few hours later at the behest of her mother, her voice as cool as the washcloth on his brow, but after a few minutes, she’s telling him a long, drawn out story about the latest, greatest love of her life and she’s forgotten that this week she wishes he was vapor.

Mindy’s in the background, singing along to some stupid pop song (that no one over the age of thirty has any business knowing the words to) and he clearly pictures his wife with her face scrubbed, tacky bits of moisturizer still clinging to her earlobes, doing an arrhythmic dance routine in their previously shared kitchen.

This is something they’ve done before; his thumb digging into her waist as he leads her in a complicated pas de deux around the open dishwasher and the oven as it preheats. He still feels the nap of her terry cloth robe under his fingers as they splay over her lower back and the silk of her hair rustling under his chin.

The heat of Mindy’s palm presses flat against his untucked button down, her wedding ring twisted and poking at his arm, as he glides in his socks across the hardwood. Cleo covers her face with her hands-- _Oh God, you two are disgusting_ \--and Ben brokers peace by pulling his sister into the melee and following his parent's lead.

That’s how it always happens; how the wormholes unseal and suck him back through, just from a phone call, or a commercial about cat food, or a playlist he makes for a long car ride.

He knows about time and wounds and healing.  And he’s fine with that. He gets it.

Give him another three months and he may even want to marry her again.


End file.
